Forty-eight hours later, Rose was in Seattle, up talking into the night. They sat, she and Stephen, in his study on twin leather recliners, perfect chairs, neither soft nor hard, as easy to rise from as to sit down on and angled toward a great wall of windows overlooking Puget Sound. In the day, the view was of the water and, at night, of the lights near and far. In lieu of a fireplace, Leslie had improvised on a low table half a dozen beeswax pillars which, when lit, produced enough light by which to read Rose’s new pages of score. It was a perfect room.
Since the visit to Frogtown, Rose had barely slept. She’d been up at the piano through a day and a night and then had stumbled onto the train. She might have caught a plane, but given the wedding-bankrupt state of her savings, last-minute airfare was out of the question, and on the train she could spread out her manuscript pages and go on working.
What Stephen thought of her new pages, she wouldn’t know until the next day, however. Leslie lit the candles between them, kissed Stephen, and went off to bed, wishing them well with their work. She didn’t seem to know that her husband never worked at night.
“So,” he said when Leslie had gone, “what’s up?”
“Fresh horrors. Wait till you hear,” said Rose. “I hope you’re not sleepy.”
“Never sleepy, never tired.” He brought out the bottle of brandy and the glasses.
“Aren’t you hot, wrapped up in that?” she asked him. He had the present she’d brought him from the train-station gift shop around his shoulders, an eye-popping red shawl like the one Susan B. Anthony wore. He’d crowed with delight, wrapped himself in the shawl, and worn it all day and to evening rehearsal, where he’d made a show of it to the orchestra, bringing Rose up to the front to narrate while he modeled it, and had put it on again to go home.
He shook his head, but loosened the folds of the shawl. The night was fine. The warm breath of early summer murmured through the screens. She slipped off her sandals and rubbed a foot against the leather footrest.
“So,” she said and laid Frogtown before him, the dark hallway of the rooming house, Meggy’s scribbles along the wall, that final sight of Meggy kneeling beside Natalie, their eyes squeezed tight. She choked out a laugh, but Stephen regarded her without gasping or laughing. Was it too extreme to be funny? And she hadn’t even told it all. She’d left out the nasty bathroom. What was she doing, over a thousand miles away, serving Natalie and Meggy up for the amusement of a colleague? And failing— the story wasn’t amusing.
“Well,” said Stephen. “What else? Something’s got you buzzing— something happy.”
“No, really,” she told him. “I need your advice.” The family court date was approaching.
“You’ll know what to do,” he said. “C’mon, you’ve already decided.”
It was true—she had. But she could feel her sister’s fear. She told Stephen how Natalie had pleaded with her not to take Meggy away, how she’d put Meggy on the phone to beg.
“Duet!” cried Stephen. “Show-stopper of a tune—Don’t take away my baay-by—Don’t take away-ay my mom!”
“Stephen. “
“You’re just a witness, Rose. And you’d be surprised what kids can survive.”
“Oh, really?” How did he know? Had he been taken from his mother? What if he was down on his luck or crazy and a judge decided to take his daughters, she thought, but didn’t ask.
That afternoon, while he’d studied her score, Rose had played with his daughters for hours, observing how safely they rested within their parents’ custody. They had their own wing of the house, tucked up into the hill-side, a bathroom and two bedrooms full of lovely clothes and toys. Built into the wall separating their bedrooms was a doll house with open windows and grand little doorways through which hands could reach. Like giants eyeing each other from either side, Alexis and Starr reached in to move dolls and furniture, while narrating their dramas. Rose had been assigned to be the weather. She was to shout for thunder and to use the flashlight for lightning. Water was, unfortunately, banned. Firecrackers too—she knew how their dad was.
“He says it’s dangerous,” they sighed. Their life was so restrictive.
Rose related all this to Stephen. He didn’t laugh even then.
“Two darling girls,” he said, arching back in his leather chair, “with a happy life. But not a perfect life. For instance, how can they ever explain why their parents don’t sleep together?”
“Uh-huh,” said Rose, her voice carefully neutral.
Stephen did have a fault. He snored but refused to believe it. Rose had heard him from her bed in the guest room, barely muffled through walls and closed doors, the sound like a piece of paper caught in a vacuum cleaner. The earplugs had not been invented that could obstruct his snoring, Leslie had confided to Rose, laughing. But he was irrationally sensitive about it and had been horrified, insulted, betrayed to find Leslie gone if he awoke in the night. So Stephen had given up the marriage bed to Leslie—no, no, he’d sleep elsewhere; he would not ruin her sleep. He had a bed built into his study wall, recessed and hidden by a curtain.
“He only pretends to suffer about where we sleep at night,” Leslie had told Rose. Behind the curtain on a rainy afternoon, Alexis had been conceived. And on a snowy one, Starr.
Rose settled deeper into her leather chair. Stephen’s bed was hidden behind its curtain across the room, but she’d once glimpsed a snowy coverlet over a mounded mattress. A featherbed. Stephen seemed as easy as a god in his comforts. The lights on the Sound blinked and burned and bounced off the water, which, in the dark, seemed fathomlessly deep.
“You’re not telling,” he said. “What else?”
What was there to tell him? There was nothing but dark water. Ursula bobbed up. She would tell about Ursula.
She’d nearly been fired from Ursula’s wedding. When the piano tuner plugged in the phone, it hadn’t been Natalie again, but Ursula calling about whether to have mints or nuts for her wedding reception. “Oh, hello, sweetheart,” Rose had said to soothe her friend. Sweetheart, she’d said, not Ursula, so, of course, the tuner had inferred that she had a boyfriend. She saw the effect of her words and was thoroughly annoyed with herself. He’d dropped his shoulders, pocketed his tuning fork, nodded to her, all formal again, and had gone out her door.
“The wedding,” Stephen prompted. “You were fired from the wedding.”
“Very nearly.” As Rose began to tell it, she kept the tuner to herself. About him, there was nothing yet to say.
Over the phone, Ursula had demanded to know if Rose was paying attention.
“Why not mints and nuts?” said Rose.
“Because we’re running out of money,” said Ursula.
“Then neither.”
“But we can’t do neither, we can’t do nothing, we can’t just set empty tables. We’ll be earning a ton in the future. We don’t want to look back ashamed of a crummy reception. It’s our wedding—it’s supposed to be great. Bruce is out walking,” she’d added.
“Ah!” said Stephen. “Out walking.”
“Right,” said Rose. “The bride has been fighting with the bridegroom.”
“Never mind Bruce,” Ursula had declared. “Things have to be decided.” Should it be initials or a quote on the personalized paper reception napkins; mints or nuts or mints and nuts in tiny china cups or in fluted paper matching the color of the napkins?
“Ursula,” Rose had ventured, “I have absolutely no opinion.”
“Oh-oh,” said Stephen.
“Well, I didn’t say it that coldly. I just told her to do whatever she wanted.”
“Wrong move,” said Stephen.
“Really,” Rose concurred.
Ursula had burst into tears. “I want you to help me. To be with me through this—this nightmare.”
“You’re having a fight with Bruce. It’ll be okay. He loves you.”
“No, I am not having a fight with Bruce—I’m having a fight with you. If you don’t have time for me, just say so. You don’t even have to stand up with me if you don’t want to.”
“And you’d better want to,” Stephen put in.
“Don’t do anything you don’t want to do,” Ursula had concluded in ringing tones. “You don’t have to be at the wedding at all.”
“Ho-kay,” said Stephen. “Bye-bye, Ursula. We don’t need the stress.”
“Oh, I can’t drop out,” said Rose, though, at the time, she’d pictured the swift donation of a bridesmaid dress and corset to the college theater shop.
“Why not?” said Stephen. “Shit. Don’t tell me you’re one of those good girls.”
“You don’t walk out on your friend right before her wedding.”
“Sounds like the Good Girl Code to me.”
“Is Leslie a good girl?” she asked him. He sighed. “And Alexis and Starr? Or are you raising them to be bad girls?”
“Don’t change the subject.”
Rose was a good girl. She had made profuse apology to Ursula and gradually the crisis was averted, very gradually—a half-hour later, she was still apologizing.
“You could reassure me,” Ursula had suggested. “You could say you’re looking forward to it, that it’s an honor to stand up with me. Unless you don’t think so. I mean, sometimes it’s like I’m getting married all by myself. Even Bruce looks at me funny. You think he loves me?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Rose.
“He calls me his tiger kitten,” Ursula remarked and giggled.
“Ah,” said Stephen. “The secret of Ursula—between the sheets, a tiger kitten. That explains the man’s patience.”
“Spare me,” said Rose.
She’d had to stay on the phone with Ursula, working from tiger kitten back to mints and nuts, and when they hung up, it was past eleven, too late to call the piano tuner. But, while soothing Ursula, she’d studied his address. He lived just a few blocks away. For a shivery instant, while Ursula yammered on, Rose had imagined Graham Lowe calling her “tiger kitten.”
She told none of this to Stephen. She wouldn’t have him know she was aflutter over a piano tuner. She pushed back into the padded leather and gazed up into the starlight. The thought of Graham pleased her absurdly. A chuckle escaped her.
“And?” said Stephen. “If you don’t tell me, I’ll be forced to guess.”
“The night wasn’t over,” she said.
Rose had gone to bed and to sleep. Otherwise, what occurred next would have been unremarkable. Instead it began with a scare—what she’d thought at first was a break-in.
“Have you ever,” she asked Stephen, “been allowed to witness someone falling in love? Someone you thought never would fall seriously in love?”
“With you?”
“No—with someone else.”
“I would think,” he said, “one would rather participate than witness.”
She regarded him. He seemed bored with what she had to say. For the first time in conversation with him, her life seemed to lose luster in the telling. He seemed to want her to say something in particular rather than anything at all. It had been a great freedom she’d enjoyed, the freedom to tell him anything at all. But perhaps she was the one who was spoiling things, dropping her candor and putting falseness between them, imagining he would judge her. It wasn’t his fault he had money and prestige. Maybe he’d come from no money at all—he’d never breathed a word about his childhood. He might well have earned everything, as she had. Maybe the nasty bathroom in the rooming house in Frogtown wouldn’t faze him at all. Maybe, too, he’d be charmed by her little crush on her piano tuner. She ought to stop where she was in her story, circle back and put in what she’d left out.
“Later that night,” he said. “Go on.”
She did not circle back; she went on. Later that night, after she’d gone to bed, she became drowsily aware that she was no longer alone in her apartment. For several minutes in that netherworld between sleeping and waking, she’d been unable to move, as though she were mud with roots growing through her. Really, she’d had the sensation of roots growing down, right through her shoulder and through her face, as though pinning her to the mattress.
“Uh-huh,” said Stephen. “And?”
Why was he rushing her? She was performing, wasn’t she? Maybe she’d shut up and he could tell a story for a change.
“And,” she continued. Paralyzed there in her bed, she saw a man’s shape. And then she was up, screaming, making for the open window where she burst a hole in the screen, a nylon screen with a tear already in it, which, thank god, ripped open quickly. And she was out on the ledge in nothing but a T-shirt and underpants. Only then did she hear Alan shouting her name.
“The gay guy upstairs with the wife and kid?”
“My friend,” she told Stephen.
“It’s Alan. I’m an idiot,” he’d called as she dragged herself back in through the window, the ripped screen burning her bare arms and thighs.
“God in heaven,” she cried. She’d have him impeached of his condo presidency and relieved of his master keys; she was serious as a heart attack. She yanked on her kimono. Someone stirred in the apartment overhead—Frances, awakened by the ruckus.
“I know, I know,” said Alan. “But I’ve brought James.” He reached into the hall and dragged someone slender and dark-skinned into the apartment.
“Let’s leave her be, man,” the stranger said softly. “Let’s get out of here.”
“This is James,” said Alan.
“He’s a tiny bit drunk,” James told her, “and we’ll be going now.”
“Rose,” Alan breathed. “This is James.”
“The chef?” she asked.
“No, no, man—the musician, the drummer. From Ethiopia,” lilted James, toeing a beat on the floor. He had wonderful slanting eyes and a heart-stopping smile.
Reaching to touch James, Alan’s hand had trembled. “I have to tell you, Rose, I love this man. I would give this man anything. I’m, like, new born. I know what love is now.”
“Such poetry,” said Stephen, dryly.
“From Alan, it is, believe me,” said Rose.
“And this is Rose,” Alan had concluded, “my best friend in all the world.”
Was she? She hadn’t seen anything of Alan in months. He was so busy with his several lives, he hardly had time for friendship. Stephen had time. Stephen was her friend. He was, yes, her very best friend now. She told him so.
“Thank you, I think,” said Stephen, his tone every bit as dry as before.
“You’re welcome,” she said. Didn’t he know that, given her life, friend-ship was nearly everything?
James had opened his arms and clasped Rose to him. He smelled lemony and she’d felt some high vibration as though his chest were full of birds, and her own chest seemed to take up the thrumming. A wild, willful look in Alan’s eye recalled the night, years ago, that he’d taken her to bed. But he was no longer that angry boy and his look was warm, ardent and certain. She’d never before seen him so entirely happy. Swiftly, he’d moved to reclaim James from her. And then, footsteps were heard descending the stairs and Frances’ soft knock came at the door.
Rose stepped out into the hall and, for the first time, told Frances a direct lie about Alan.
“White lie,” Stephen put in.
“Frances,” she’d said, “I’m so sorry,” and quickly invented the unexpected visit of an old boyfriend. “I’d let you in, but he’s not dressed.”
“I heard you scream. You sounded frightened,” said Frances. “I thought I heard Alan.” Frances rubbed her eyes. “It’s okay. You’re not the only one to make a ruckus late at night,” she said and went back upstairs.
“I don’t feel so good about that,” Rose told Alan when she’d closed her door behind her.
“It’s been tremendous to meet you,” James told her and gave Alan a tug.
But Alan pulled a chair out from Rose’s table and sat heavily down. “I love this man.” He flicked a hand toward James. “I would lay down my life for this man.”
James chuckled.
“We know this, now,” Rose told Alan. “We know this.”
“Okay,” he said, getting to his feet. “So let’s tell Frances. C’mon, let’s go tell Frances.”
“Could be the rum’s talking,” observed James.
“Love. Is talking,” said Alan.
“Really?” said Rose. “But what about Max?”
Custody was on Rose’s mind—what should be done to get Meggy away, how to argue it and arrange it. She hadn’t thought of it the other way, what a parent could lose in an instant.
“You could lose Max,” she’d blurted out to Alan.
“Undeniably,” said Stephen. “But it sounds to me like you care more than he does.”
“Then I’ve told it wrong,” said Rose.
At the mention of his son, Alan had uttered Max’s name, and Max seemed to stand in the room with them, unable to see them, yet stopped, his wild animation stilled, while his father seemed to cave in on himself, to become, in an instant, elderly. He knew Max’s need of him better than anyone, and his own need to be his son’s father. Max would, of course, be fed and sheltered, but where? And from whose hands fed?
That humans should need each other struck Rose at that moment as a grievous condition, a ruinous necessity. Ursula needed Bruce so much that she’d become not-Ursula; Natalie, while unable to care for her daughter, nonetheless grasped Meggy to her; Frances wretchedly reached for Alan even as he turned her away; and Rose, too, clung at the edges, warming herself at the fires of other people’s lives.
Alan had leaned himself against James and, forgetting Rose was there, begun stroking his lover’s chest, sadly but ardently. They would not go up to tell Frances that night. But they had each other, and even to Rose it was so obviously the right thing for Alan that the consequences could not hold sway. She told Stephen so and then stopped speaking, her story over.
When Alan and James had left her, she’d been mad with arousal and lay down briefly to satisfy herself. Then she’d gone to her piano, and the pages flew, the music buoyant, tormented, but gaining power, as though she had drawn from the lives around her not a secondhand passion, but her own self in anguish and joy. Getting up from the piano to pack for the train, she’d realized she was rank with sweat. Under the shower, she’d sung her symphony aloud while the water poured over her. The singing continued now inside her head. Stephen was right—something was up with her, something more than worry and grief, something joyous.
He rocked forward and blew out a candle. “Ever done this?” He licked his fingertips and pinched another burning wick, then another, until only one was left burning.
Rose pinched the candle out. Then they were in the dark.
“Gimme the matches,” she said.
“Well, and what about you, Rose? If you’re not in love, why not?”
“Oh, I have my adventures.”
“You’re not one of those ironclad celibates, then?”
She laughed. “Like Susan B.?”
“I’ve got my theories about Susan B., behind closed doors with all those women.”
“Hey, really,” said Rose. Even with the candles out, the room had plenty of light. Or perhaps her eyes had adjusted.
“So. You’re a lesbian, are you?”
“Oh, lord. Don’t tell me—just because I have short hair?”
“You’re heterosexual like me?” he said. “Well, how boring.”
She laughed uneasily.
“I think you’re in love,” he said.
“Well, maybe with the idea of love.” The brandy slid along her tongue. She rubbed the soft leather of the chair and turned away from him toward the lights on the water.
“Or maybe with your new best friend?”
She startled. That was what he’d been waiting to hear, that she was in love with him. The possibility hadn’t occurred to her. Instantly, she knew to pretend otherwise. He’d got up to stand behind her chair. His fingers were moving through her hair. He was her conductor; they had work ahead; they couldn’t afford to fool around. He was too old for her, nearly fifty. He was married.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
“You don’t have to whisper. No one can hear us,” he said. This was true. Leslie slept in the master bedroom in another wing. “I’m touching your marvelous hair,” he went on. “How does it feel?” Her skin buzzed. It felt lovely; how could it not? He knelt beside her. “Give me your hand. C’mon—you’ve shaken my hand a dozen times. You’ve kissed me before, please remember.”
“Yes, publicly.”
He took her hand, pulled her to him and kissed her, and she returned the kiss, self-consciously matching his pressure. How stupid of her not to see this coming. Rumors had warned her, but she had disbelieved. She’d wished for a conductor. She’d rejoiced when there was more to it—friend-ship, she’d insisted, pure friendship. The worst she’d been willing to think of him was that he was a little arrogant, controlling and shaping his world. She saw she was the same, insisting that things be the way she wished or foolishly pretending they were. Unlike Stephen, she lacked the force to make things be as she wished. She was a fool. She’d fooled her-self. She’d pretended her way into this, this situation.
“So what you feel for me is only friendship?” he said with a wicked calm in his voice.
She regretted that it took no effort to get up from the chair. To exit the bed behind the curtains wouldn’t be as easy. He led her there. The curtains parted silkily. She didn’t want this. It wasn’t love. She wanted to finish her symphony and see him conduct it. She felt not so much led as hoisted up, a sack of flour. He went on kissing her, and she went on returning his kisses promptly, like a student answering questions. The enthralling softness of his touch turned sharp, like a father’s shoulder digging up into her belly. He unloosed her fingers from the bedframe and pushed her in. The featherbed puffed up around her. He was pulling his shirt over his head.
She was going to allow this, was she?